The daemon reached out for them again, and Deathclaw plummeted, evading the creature’s claws by a finger’s width before clamping its own talons into the daemon’s back. The griffon scored down the length of the daemon’s hunched spine, ripping through sinews and exposing bony growths.
Karl Franz, poised for the manoeuvre, waited until the nape of the daemon’s neck loomed before him. It was a foul, stinking hump, studded with glossy spikes and ringed with burst pustules. He aimed carefully.
The daemon twisted, trying to throw Deathclaw loose, but Karl Franz plunged the sword down. The tip bit clean between vertebrae, driving into the bone and muscle beneath. The magic blade exploded with wild light, spiralling out from the impact site and tearing through the drifting filth around it.
The daemon arched its blubbery neck, choking out cries of blood-wet agony. Karl Franz was nearly torn loose, caught between the sway of his prey and the bucking movements of Deathclaw.
He held firm, grinding the blade in deeper. Thick blood raced up the blade, crashing over his gauntlets and fizzing against the metal. Clouds of flies swarmed in close, trying to clog Karl Franz’s visor, but he held firm.
Deathclaw roared with bloodlust, steadying itself on the heaving spine of the daemon, and Karl Franz gained the leverage he needed. With a huge heave, he wrenched the sword across, severing the daemon’s neck.
With a coiled spring, Deathclaw leapt clear. The huge daemon reeled in a torment of snapping sinew. Weeping from a hundred lesser wounds, it thrashed and jerked, spewing vomit and bile. Rancid coils of greenish smoke spilled from its eyes as the dark magicks required to keep it on the physical plane unwound.
Deathclaw climbed higher. Karl Franz sensed its raucous joy, and shared in it.
‘The blood of Sigmar!’ he cried, gazing in triumph at the horror he had ended. Its death-throes were ruinous, carving up the earth and mingling it with gouts of acidic blood. The plaguebearers thronging around it held their elongated heads in their hands, and wailed.
Upon such moments did battles turn. Whole hosts could lose heart with the death of their leader, and the momentum of entire campaigns could falter with the removal of a talismanic figurehead. Deathclaw soared above the sea of fighting men, screaming its elation at the heavens.
Karl Franz scoured the ground below, searching for any sign of Helborg. He was about to order the griffon to circle about and swoop lower when a harsher cry echoed out across the battlefield. His head snapped up, and he saw a new terror sweeping in from the north. The Chaos ranks had been sundered by a vanguard of heavily armoured knights on brazen steeds, their pauldrons rimmed with gold and their helms underpinned with iron collars. They thundered towards the surviving Reiksguard, ploughing up the ground on spiked metal hooves. These newcomers rode with greater discipline and verve than most servants of the Fallen Gods, though their livery was as foul as any blood-worshipping fanatic from the frozen north.
Above them all came a truly vast flying creature that bounded through the air with an ungainly lurch. It was the size of a war-dragon, and its colossal wings splayed across the skies like motley sheaves of blades. Unlike a true dragon, no sleek hide of jewelled scales clad its flanks and no flames kindled against its twisting neck. Where tight flesh should have stretched, raw bone glinted from between a lattice of age-blackened sinews. Gaping holes punctured an open ribcage, exposing nothing but coiled shadow within. A heavy skull lolled at the end of a bleached spine, wreathed in wisps of inky smoke, and awkwardly flapping wings were held together by mere ribbons of atrophied muscle.
The monstrosity’s rider was scarcely less extravagant in grotesquerie – an ivory-white face, elongated to accommodate protruding fangs, jutting from heavy armour plates. Bat-wing motifs vied for prominence on the armour-curves with chain-bound skulls and stretched skins. The rider carried a straight-bladed sword as black as the maw of the underworld, and it rippled with blue-tinged fires.
Karl Franz smelled the foul aroma of death roiling before it, and arrested Deathclaw’s swoop. The griffon thrust upward violently, already eager to tear at a new enemy.
Karl Franz hesitated before giving the order. The daemon had been a daunting foe, but it had already been weakened by Helborg and the Reiksguard, and Deathclaw was lethal against such earth-shackled prey. The huge creature tearing towards them, carving through the sky with sickening speed, was far larger, and had the advantage of being battle-fresh.
Moreover, something about the rider gave Karl Franz pause. He looked into those dark eyes, still a long way off, and his heart misgave him. He looked down at his blade, drenched with the blood of the slain daemon, and saw the fire in the runes flicker out.
With a glimmer of presentiment, a terrible thought stole into his mind.
This foe is beyond me.
Karl Franz knew he could refuse combat. He could do as Schwarzhelm had advised, saving himself for another fight, one that he could win. He was the Emperor, not some expendable champion amid his countless thousands of servants. His captains would understand. They would come to see that the Empire came first, and that his preservation, above all, held the promise of survival into the future.
He imagined Altdorf then, its white towers rising proudly above the filth and clamour of its tight-locked streets. He saw the river creeping sluggishly past the docks, teeming with all the burgeoning trade and industry of his people.
That place was the fulcrum about which his Empire had always revolved. He had always assumed that if death were to come for him, it would take him there.
Deathclaw screamed at the approaching abomination, straining at the reins. Karl Franz looked out across the battlefield, at the desperate struggle of the faithful against the closing ranks of horror. With every passing moment, more of his subjects met a painful, fear-filled end, locked in terrified combat with a far greater enemy than they had any right to be taking on.
I will not leave them.
‘Onward, then,’ ordered Karl Franz, shaking the blood from his runefang and angling the tip towards the skeletal dragon, ‘and strike it from the skies.’
FOUR
Schwarzhelm strode out into the heart of the battle. As he went, he drew soldiers about him, and the solid knot of swordsmen advanced under the shadow of the racing clouds.
The last of the reserve detachments had been committed to the fighting. Whole infantry squares were being hurled into the maw of the oncoming storm, in the desperate hope that sheer weight of numbers could do something to stop the tide of plague-daemons.
Schwarzhelm advanced immediately towards Talb’s eastern flank, roaring out orders to the semi-broken warbands he encountered as the fighting grew fiercer.
‘Form up!’ he roared, brandishing his longsword and raging at the Empire troops around him. ‘You are men! Born of Sigmar’s holy blood! Fight like men! Remember courage!’
His words had an instant effect. Schwarzhelm’s voice was known to every last halberdier and pikeman in the army, and though he was not loved as Helborg’s flamboyance made him loved, no living fighter was more respected. Schwarzhelm was a vast bear of a man, clad in plate armour and bearing the fabled Sword of Justice before him, and the mere rumour of his presence on the field kindled hope in men’s hearts again.